Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
The Roots of Obama's Rage (17 page)
Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama served as a cook for the British army in Myanmar (then called Burma) and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon); later he provided domestic help in Kenya in various British households. The British often called him “boy” and “coolie” and subjected him to routine insults. He may even have suffered greater indignities: historian David Anderson writes, “Kenya’s settlers regulated their African labor through a version of the old English master-and-servants laws, and defended their right under this legislation to administer corporal punishments to their domestic staff and farm laborers.” Anderson writes that flogging was common in Kenya, while it was very rare in neighboring British colonies like Uganda or Tanganyika.
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Onyango was arrested by the colonial authorities in 1949, just as the Mau Mau rebellion was starting. He was accused of being a rebel sympathizer. The charge was prima facie dubious; Onyango belonged to the Luo tribe, and the Luo were not on good terms with the Kikuyu. Even so, there were some Luo who were part of the Mau Mau rebellion. We read, for instance, in B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’s
Decolonization and Independence in Kenya
that “the Mau Mau raiders of Athi River prison in 1953 included a contingent of Luo combatants.”
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Still, that was four years after Onyango’s arrest, so he could not have been one of the collaborators. According to one of his wives, Sarah Obama, Onyango was beaten until he confessed that he was, in fact, a Mau Mau collaborator. At this point Onyango was left without food for days, and occasionally British soldiers showed up to poke him with sharp objects or squeeze his genitals between metal rods. Onyango saw some of his fellow prisoners die from torture. Others simply disappeared and were never heard from again. When Onyango finally returned home, according to Sarah, “I saw that he was now an old man.”
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Decolonization and Independence in Kenya
that “the Mau Mau raiders of Athi River prison in 1953 included a contingent of Luo combatants.”
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Still, that was four years after Onyango’s arrest, so he could not have been one of the collaborators. According to one of his wives, Sarah Obama, Onyango was beaten until he confessed that he was, in fact, a Mau Mau collaborator. At this point Onyango was left without food for days, and occasionally British soldiers showed up to poke him with sharp objects or squeeze his genitals between metal rods. Onyango saw some of his fellow prisoners die from torture. Others simply disappeared and were never heard from again. When Onyango finally returned home, according to Sarah, “I saw that he was now an old man.”
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One might expect that Obama Jr. would sympathize with his grandfather Onyango, especially upon discovering his abuse at the hands of the British. Interestingly, Obama has no such reaction and treats his grandfather with scathing contempt. The reason emerges soon enough. Sarah Obama—whom Obama calls “granny”—tells him that once Onyango was released, he left the city and became a rural farmer and goat-herder. There he began to speculate on the source of the white man’s power. “What your grandfather respected was strength,” Granny says. Onyango began to tell his family and friends that superior knowledge was the source of the white man’s effectiveness. He would even suggest that whites had conquered the world because they were better organized and more competent with technology than blacks. “The white man alone is like an ant,” Onyango liked to say. “He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together.... Black men are not like this.... That is why the black man will always lose.” Africans, he feared, were headed nowhere because of the inherent lethargy and stupidity of the native people. “The African is thick,” Onyango would sometimes say. “For him to do anything, he needs to be beaten.”
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It is not hard to see that, after Obama heard this, he was basically done with grandpa. Obama writes, “I had imagined him to be an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule.” But now Obama had a totally different perspective. “What Granny had told me scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.”
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Ironically, Obama’s sympathies are entirely reserved for his father, even though Obama Sr. only experienced colonialism as a child. Obama is deeply touched to hear about his father walking miles to school, proudly bringing his grades back home to his parents, and eventually moving to the port city of Mombasa where he became active in politics. In 1952 Obama Sr. was briefly jailed during the emergency declared by the British to deal with the Mau Mau uprising. After his release, Obama Sr. made his connection with Mboya and continued his involvement in the anti-colonial cause. Then, thanks to the two missionary women, he got his big chance to go to America. For Obama Jr. this was the great moment, his father’s chance to make a difference and change his country and the world, but tragically the promise was never fulfilled, and his father died a broken man. One might attribute this to his father’s chronic carelessness and irresponsibility, both with himself and with others, but Obama Jr. views those characteristics as themselves shaped by colonial victimization. Somehow the badge of inferiority and humiliation, somehow the sharp currents of history that no one talks about—these are responsible for denying Barack Obama Sr. his rightful dream.
For Obama the dream is non-negotiable; it is everything; anyone who denies it is beneath contempt. In Nairobi, Obama is happy to commune with his relatives, most of them doing nothing with their lives, the men looking for government benefits, the women for men who will provide for them. But then he encounters one of his own half-brothers, Mark. Mark, the son of Barack Sr. and Ruth Nidesand, seems a lot like Obama. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown and his masters from Stanford, both in physics. Mark then lived and worked in the United States. (Since then he got his MBA from Emory and is now a business consultant living in China.)
In another sense, however, Mark could not be more different from his half-brother Barack. He professes no real attachment to Kenya—“just another poor, African country”—and when Obama asks, “You don’t think about settling here?” Mark replies, “There’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.” Mark has also changed his last name from Obama to Ndesandjo, relinquishing his own dad’s name and taking the name of the man who married his mother after she divorced Barack Sr. Surprised by Mark’s indifference, not only to Kenya but also to his own father, Obama persists: “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?” Mark replies, “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing. Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.”
Shocked by Mark’s disdain for his idol, Obama presses him. “That doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?” Mark compounds the offense. “Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know—it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. Who knows? What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.” At this point Obama is done with Mark. “Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.”
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Obama doesn’t want to see his brother again. The temptation has presented itself—the temptation to deny his father and his African homeland—and he has successfully resisted it.
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Obama doesn’t want to see his brother again. The temptation has presented itself—the temptation to deny his father and his African homeland—and he has successfully resisted it.
In the climax to his narrative, Obama visits the burial mounds of his father and grandfather. This scene is absolutely pivotal for Obama’s development. Obama himself recognizes this, and he leads up to it with a sense of drama and trepidation. First he describes going out into the wilderness past a group of painted Masai. What follows is virtually biblical.
We came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood.... It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind.... I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death.
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Why is Obama raising the issue of creation? Because his narrative is really about his own death and rebirth. Next Obama describes his granny braiding hair as she sits him down outside their family hut and tells him about himself. This is Obama’s book of Genesis, and so predictably he writes, “I asked Granny to start from the beginning.” Granny’s beginning has a very familiar tone: “First there was Miwiru. It’s not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kosodhi, Kosodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo.”
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Granny describes the idyllic times before colonialism.
This is the time before the white man came. Each family had their own compound, but they all lived under the laws of the elders. Men had their own huts, and were responsible for clearing and cultivating their land, as well as protecting the cattle from wild animals and the raids of other tribes. Each wife had her own vegetable plot, which only she and her daughters would cultivate. She cooked the man’s food, drew water, and maintained the huts. The elders regulated all plantings and the harvests.... The children did not go to school but learned alongside their parents. The girls would accompany their mothers and learn how to grind the millet into porridge, how to grow vegetables and pack clay for the huts. The boys learned from their fathers how to herd and work
pangas
and throw spears.
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As Obama hears his family history, he is moved into a kind of reverie. “How to explain the emotions of that day? I can summon each moment in my mind almost frame by frame . . . .It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place.”
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Obama takes the great Kenyan railroad from Nairobi to Kisumu. Obama knows his colonial history.
The railway had been the single largest engineering effort in the history of the British empire at the time it was built—six hundred miles long, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria.... It seemed like ancient history. And yet I know that 1895, the year that the first beams were laid, had also been the year of my grandfather’s birth.... The thought made the history of the train come alive for me, and I tried to imagine the sensations some nameless British officer might have felt on the train’s maiden voyage, as he sat in his gas-lit compartment and looked out over miles of receding bush.... I tried to imagine the African on the other side of the glass window, watching this snake of steel and black smoke passing his village for the first time.
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Before he visits the family gravesite, Obama is given some small but priceless mementos of his own ancestry. He gets a
Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register
that his grandfather once possessed, along with some of the old man’s letters. More valuable, he gets a stack of letters that his own father wrote to various American colleges—Morgan State, Santa Barbara Junior College, San Francisco State—seeking admission. “Dear President Calhoun,” one letter begins. “I have heard of your college from Mrs. Helen Roberts of Palo Alto, California, who is now in Nairobi here. Mrs. Roberts, knowing how much desirous I am to further my studies in the United States of America, has asked me to apply to your esteemed college for admission.” And so on. Obama cannot believe what he is holding in his hands. “This is it,” he writes. “My inheritance.”
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Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register
that his grandfather once possessed, along with some of the old man’s letters. More valuable, he gets a stack of letters that his own father wrote to various American colleges—Morgan State, Santa Barbara Junior College, San Francisco State—seeking admission. “Dear President Calhoun,” one letter begins. “I have heard of your college from Mrs. Helen Roberts of Palo Alto, California, who is now in Nairobi here. Mrs. Roberts, knowing how much desirous I am to further my studies in the United States of America, has asked me to apply to your esteemed college for admission.” And so on. Obama cannot believe what he is holding in his hands. “This is it,” he writes. “My inheritance.”
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Finally Obama visits the grave where both his grandfather and father are buried. Briefly, he recalls his grandfather, but then
the picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy—my father.... How lucky he must have felt when his ship came sailing in. He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all; that he possessed the grace of his name, the
Baraka
, the blessings of God. With the degree, the ascot, the American wife, the car, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing seamless and natural, without the cobbled-together, haphazard quality of an earlier time—what could stand in his way? He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all!
At this point Obama is simply overcome with emotion.
I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion.... No shame in the fear.... There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or recreate himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones.
Obama continues, “For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept.” And from that weeping came something new, something that wasn’t there before.
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